Exploring the Extent of the Use of Mental Imagery in Human Cognition

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The Issue

Mental imagery, the process by which people summon and think with images not immediately drawn from their senses has been a topic of contention in the field of Cognitive Science for some time. The question, in its most general sense, is whether or not people use mental imagery as a way of thinking about problems and arriving at solutions. Like many areas in cognitive science, philosophers, psychologists, and thinkers have struggled with how the mind works with imagery for thousands of years, and there is still no firm consensus on the matter. More recently, scientific experiments have been able to shed a great deal of light on how the brain works, and the ways in which it is subdivided functionally. More and more is being learned about the detailed workings of the mind all the time, and this has allowed for increased precision and scrutiny of the thoeries that are advanced about the use of mental imagery as an element of human cognition. As a result, the question of mental imagery has increasingly shifted from one of feasability to one of the implementation and pervasiveness of this form of thought. How does the brain deal with what we would call mental images? Just how much like a perceptual image is a mental image? These are the questions that are now being asked by the modern theories of mental imagery.

Alternatives

The first theory to examine is that there is no mental imagery to speak of - that mental imagery plays no part in human cognition, and that, regardless of the underlying explanatory mechanism postulated, humans do not make use of mental imagery. The second theory is that humans think only in mental imagery, to the exclusion of all other forms of thought. Like the first one, this theory adopts a...

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